Sony has seemingly started taking action against shovelware titles, as a single publisher has been wiped off the face of the PlayStation Store.
Seemingly, every gaming storefront has a big problem with quality control at the moment. AI slop fills the streets, weird puzzle games that feature random photos of women, and rip-offs of popular games like Schedule 1 and Animal Crossing appear on platforms where the originals aren't available. While Steam is mostly the wild west, it's almost as bad with PlayStation and Nintendo's stores, too, and for the most part, no one seemed bothered, but Sony has seemingly just taken a major step against shovelware.
As spotted by Twitter user RobThanatos, every single PlayStation game by publisher ThiGames has been removed from the store. ThiGames was the fourth-largest publisher on PlayStation, with 1,194 games available on the store. Including the "The Jumping" series of games, which makes up a large majority of its published titles, with games like "The Jumping Spaghetti," "The Jumping Wrap," and its iconic sequel "The Jumping Wrap TURBO," and of course, who could forget "The Jumping Orange 3"?
A look at TrueTrophies' database shows that the majority of this publisher's games have a completion time of "0-0.5 hours"; effectively, these are cheap games that offer Platinum Trophies for players to boost their accounts. So if you play The Jumping Pumpkin and jump 500 times, you'll be awarded with a Platinum.
Of course, ThiGames isn't the only publisher to release games like this, and other Platinum farm publishers like Webnetic (who are third on the list of most published games) are seemingly unaffected by this ban. RobThanatos reckons "PlayStation won't ban a publisher because they deem their games shovelware," saying that, "The publisher would likely have to have broken a serious rule for this to happen."
As of right now, ThiGames hasn't released any statement about the ban. But given that it just released The Jumping Bonbon Match 5 last week, it's not a great time.
Schedule 1 dev says phony PlayStation listings "are not affiliated with me in any way," but would "love" to port the open-world crime game to console when it's "at the right stage."
